Tips, Tricks & Articles

Fiscal Year End Tips - Regardless of when you end your year, there are a few steps you should take to help prepare your books for taxes:

Reconcile bank and credit card accounts: This is a good step to verify that you’ve tracked all money into and out of the company.

First, ask your accountant what information they need and in what format. They may simply want reports and supporting documents.  More often, though, they’ll request a backup of your data (use the portable company file if you email the backup–it’s a smaller, more compressed file, so easier to email), or an accountant’s copy (double-check what they want for a dividing date, but most likely it will be the fiscal year-end date). In addition to your QuickBooks file or reports, your accountant will most likely have their own list of information they’ll want from you. So be sure to ask them what all they need. And be sure to make a backup of your file to keep.

Print out a Trial Balance (Reports, Accountants & Taxes, Trial Balance); a trial balance is a summary of all your QuickBooks accounts. If you don’t understand the Trial Balance (it’s designed for accountants), you might also want to print out a Profit & Loss and a Balance Sheet for the fiscal year.  Keep these reports with your backup so you know exactly what you gave your accountant.

Your accountant will usually run a trial balance for 12/31 of the last tax year they did for your business (e.g. 12/31/07). They’ll use that as their starting point for doing your 2008 taxes. If it’s changed, they’ll need to figure out why (at your expense).

Password protect: If you have administrative access, then go into Edit, Preferences, Accounting—here you can set a password (maybe Ask CPA) that would need to be entered if you want to make any changes to last year.  A rule of thumb is, don’t make changes to last tax year after you give your accountant your file unless you talk to your accountant first. This helps ensure that next year when they start your taxes, they won’t have to figure out all the changes you made. Once they complete your taxes, they’ll most likely have some adjusting entries for you to make. Make those and then DON’T change numbers for the year they did your tax return, unless you talk to them first.

Back to Resources